A University of Cincinnati police officer was indicted Wednesday on a charge of murder for fatally shooting an unarmed black man during a traffic stop earlier this month.

“It was so unnecessary for this to occur,” Joe Deters, the Hamilton County prosecutor, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Sam Dubose, 43, was shot and killed during a July 19 traffic stop by Officer Ray Tensing. The officer initially said he was dragged by Dubose’s car, leading to the shooting. Deters said that Dubose “was subdued,” adding that Tensing had his license plate number.

“This office has probably reviewed upwards of hundreds of police shootings, and this is the first time that we’ve thought this is without question a murder,” he said.

While a university police report stated that Tensing said he had been dragged by the car before shooting, Deters said that the officer not dragged. Rather, Tensing fell backwards after shooting Dubose in the head, Deters said.

Deters called the situation “a pretty chicken-crap stop” and a “senseless, asinine” shooting. He also said that if Dubose began to leave, the officer should have just let him go rather than shoot him in the head. An arrest warrant had been issued for Tensing, the prosecutor said.

“I’m treating him like a murderer,” he said. “They’re out to get him.”…

Just released Body Cam video shows officer shooting DuBose as he pulls away in his car.

When will we start holding racism and misogyny accountable for the violence they rationalize and inspire?

The man who opened fire in a Lafayette, La., movie theater showing of the arguably feminist film “Trainwreck” was, by all accounts, a far-right ideologue. “He was anti-abortion,” a radio host who knew shooter John Russell Houser said. “The best I can recall, Rusty had an issue with feminine rights.” He reportedly encouraged “violent” responses to abortion and the idea of women in the workforce. A bar Houser owned reportedly flew a Nazi flag out front as an anti-government statement. He lashed out against “sexual deviants.” He posted comments against immigrants and the black community. Plus, he ranted against social service programs and “had lot of anti-tax issues,” another person who knew Houser said.

Houser was steeped and stewing in right-wing xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist and racist hate. He was obviously crazy. It’s generally safe to assume everyone who commits mass murder is. But Houser was crazy and held some beliefs that were variations of more mainstream conservative beliefs. The roots of some of Houser’s political views are hard to distinguish from ideas espoused by many, if not most, of the candidates running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

I want to be very clear here: I am NOT saying any of them would endorse or remotely condone Houser’s violence or the extremities to which he took his beliefs. Period, full stop.

Still it’s naïve, not to mention counterproductive, not to acknowledge that what ensnarled Houser’s singular mind grew from seeds of a widely sowed ideology. Houser was a bad seed, of course. And he fell far from the tree. But he was of it.

Look at Donald Trump saying that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and drug dealers. Or Rand Paul saying paying taxes is tantamount to slavery, or Mike Huckabee calling gay marriage a “perversion” and Ben Carson calling women who take birth control “entitled.” Not to mention the GOP repeatedly encrusting anti-gay and anti-woman policies into its official platform while consistently working to block everything from comprehensive immigration reform to basic non-discrimination laws to equal pay. Again, to say this rhetoric causes tragedies like those in Lafayette would be too simplistic. But to say there’s no connection at all is downright stupid.

When there’s evidence that a mass shooting suspect who’s Muslim espoused anti-American, pro-radical Islamicist views, we tie that suspect to the broader ideology. Consider the shooter in Chattanooga, Tenn., for instance, whom conservative politicians linked not only to radical Islam but to ISIS specifically, despite the lack of evidence for that link and even some evidence to the contrary.

Black Americans are presumed to bear blame as a group even when they’re the victims of violence. This weekend, after a national gathering in Cleveland, leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement were tear-gassed by police. Some online instantly implied that the activists must have done something to provoke the police — reflecting the inherent bias about which Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in warning to his black son that “you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you.” We automatically pathologize all black people whether they’re perpetrating violence or the victims, regardless of the facts.

And yet when white men shoot up movie theaters or black churches, they’re given the benefit of individuality. We don’t automatically assume that they represent some disease within all, or even a subset of, other white men. Even in the face of evidence such as espoused racist, misogynistic views and participation in organized hate groups, we still resist drawing any broader conclusions about any white men other than the shooter. Meanwhile, most mass shooters are white men. Communities of color or of minority religions, as a whole, are rarely given the benefit of the doubt of collective innocence. White men, and white people in general, always are. That white privilege extends even to white mass murderers shows just how insidious it is….More...

In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, the National Rifle Association proposed putting more guns in schools. After a racist shot up a Charleston prayer group, an NRA board member argued for more guns in church. And now predictably, politicians and gun rights advocates are calling for guns in movie theaters after a loner killed two people at a theater in Louisiana.

The study was commissioned by the National Gun Victims Action Council, an advocacy group devoted to enacting “sensible gun laws” that “find common ground between legal gun owners and non-gun owners that minimizes gun violence in our culture.” The study found that proper training and education are key to successfully using a firearm in self-defense: “carrying a gun in public does not provide self-defense unless the carrier is properly trained and maintains their skill level,” the authors wrote in a statement.

They recruited 77 volunteers with varying levels of firearm experience and training, and had each of them participate in simulations of three different scenarios using the firearms training simulator at the Prince George’s County Police Department in Maryland. The first scenario involved a carjacking, the second an armed robbery in a convenience store, and the third a case of suspected larceny.

They found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, people without firearms training performed poorly in the scenarios. They didn’t take cover. They didn’t attempt to issue commands to their assailants. Their trigger fingers were either too itchy — they shot innocent bystanders or unarmed people, or not itchy enough — they didn’t shoot armed assailants until they were already being shot at…More…

And if you are wondering about that open carrying a gun while black thing…

Now, those of you who know BTx3 know I am not anti-gun…But I am anti-stupidity. I grew up with relatives in the mountains and farming community, who owned guns and used them in hunting. So having guns in the house was no big deal. Having guns safely stored in the house, out of the reach of the little ones was. Wasn’t unusual to see a shotgun mounted on a rack above the back door in rural homes, especially by the older folks for several reasons. One, protection of the farm animals from predators such as foxes, hawks, and snakes, second for protection from the local KKK whack jobs real or imagined threat.

Carrying a gun on the street is a whole different animal. Just as the guys in the country were better hunters than we “city-slickers”, Cops are better at it than some jumped up civilian exercising his questionable “Constitutional Rights”. The simple reason is training …Not just once in a Concealed Carry Course..But over and over again in situational mock ups. Despite all of that, Cops still make numerous mistakes. I can’t imagine the carnage some John Wayne wannabe would unleash trying to confront a crazy shooting up a movie theater.

PRARIE VIEW, Texas — The sign was homemade, all but two words written in black on white strips of paper attached to a wrought iron fence facing University Drive, the gateway to Prairie View A&M University.

“Signal lane change or sheriff may kill you,” it said. “Kill you” was written in red.

Sandra Bland had come to the area from Chicago for a job interview on July 9 at Prairie View, a historically black school that was her alma mater. She was stopped the next day by a state trooper for failing to signal near the entrance on University Drive, and then arrested on suspicion of assaulting the officer.

For some, the sign struck a chord.

“It was a comment about what happened,” said Mike James, 54, the former video coordinator for the Prairie View football team.

James said Bland’s traffic stop “made no sense to me. The only reason she changed lanes was to get out of the way” of the trooper. James walked to campus Friday on University Drive so he would pass a memorial erected at the site where she was stopped.

Bland, 28, was found dead in her cell July 13 at the jail run by the Waller County sheriff’s office about 60 miles northwest of Houston, hanging from a partition by a plastic bag. Her death was ruled a suicide in an autopsy released Friday.

A photograph of the sign went viral after it was posted online Tuesday, retweeted thousands of times.

But later Tuesday, the sign had disappeared.

“I don’t know why they took it down,” James said. But then he added, “This is a Democratic, black area surrounded by white Republican people. They’re afraid of the political repercussions.”

The home behind the fence where the sign was posted is like many in the surrounding Alta Vista subdivision: a battered single-story brick ranch house.

The young African American mother who answered the door Friday had red eyes and said she had grown tired of dealing with the sign. She did not want to give her name, worried about retaliation.

When the sign first appeared a week after Bland’s death, she feared for her family’s safety. She was upset at whoever put it there, saying she thought: “You just put a target on our backs.”

She pulled it down. By Tuesday, someone had posted the sign again.

“So I cut it down,” she said.

No one at neighboring businesses seemed to know whose idea the sign was.

“Whoever did it, they’re crying out,” said Audrey Saul, who was cleaning out her Saul’s Wheel’m & Deal antique shop down the street.

Saul, 50, admired the sign-maker’s bravery. But she also understood the fear of the young mother who took it down. “Until people get the fear out of them …,” Saul said as she stood outside her shop in the afternoon heat, shaking her head.

“Let’s move forward and rise up. Exposure is the only thing that’s going to help now,” she said, setting off to ask neighboring businesses and bystanders about the sign.

She tried a barbershop. But the owner had not seen the sign, nor had he ventured out when Bland was stopped across the street, where her memorial now stands at the foot of an oak tree.

“They are so afraid in this town. They don’t want any retaliation. Like the barber said: He didn’t go out,” Saul said as she left.

She tried nearby PV Grocery. The owner had not seen the sign. In the parking lot, she spotted her former brother-in-law, who made some calls to friends around town, but got nowhere.

She called the Rev. Walter Pendleton of Pendleton Chapel Baptist Church in nearby Hempstead, and then walked to the memorial to wait for him, saying, “He probably knows. I bet he did some investigating.”

She passed a small white wood frame church, Hope AME. After the pastor, the Rev. Lenora Dabney, spoke at Bland’s memorial on campus Tuesday, she said, she received threats.

By the time Saul reached the memorial, an older African American man from Georgia was snapping photos with his phone. Bland’s photograph was affixed to the tree trunk, surrounded by fabric roses, many yellow, and a heart-shaped barrier of white stones.

David Levell, 62, of Atlanta had come to visit his grandson at the university, and brought him to see the memorial.

“They talk about it all over Georgia,” the postal worker said of the case, adding that it resonates with him.

“I’ve been pulled over myself, stopped unnecessarily. I’ve had them stop me and ask where I’m going” — even in his postal uniform, he said.

“I think he abused his authority,” Saul said of the trooper.

“I do too,” Levell said. But, he added, “nothing will come of it.”

Just then, Pendleton and his wife arrived in matching red shorts and white T-shirts. No word on the sign-maker, he said: Residents are concerned about speaking up, even leaders.

“We couldn’t get these local pastors here,” Pendleton said.

“People are so afraid,” Saul said.

“They can’t shut me up!” Pendleton said, adding that he wants the district attorney removed, accusing him of selective prosecution.

Saul crossed the street to question a man in a Chicago Bulls jersey smoking in front of Amistad Bookplace. Chris Benard, 34, never saw the sign, but he agreed with its message.

“People got to realize we are all targets,” said Benard, who grew up in South Los Angeles and now works as a cook at the university.

Like others here, he doesn’t trust local and state investigators who, he said, “are going to protect their own.” Saul told him she’s waiting for the results of an independent autopsy the family’s lawyer has said they will pursue.

But even with an independent autopsy, Benard said, Bland still “can’t speak for herself.”

Police say the officer fired one shot as the man sped away.

An unarmed black man was shot and killed on Sunday by a white police officer after he was pulled over for a missing front license plate.

Samuel Dubose, 43, was stopped by University of Cincinnati officer Ray Tensing on Sunday evening, according to CNN. Tensing repeatedly asked Dubose for his driver’s license, but according to the Cincinnati Police Department, he refused and instead handed the officer a bottle of alcohol.

Then Tensing asked Dubose to get out of his car, which he also refused to do, according to police.

“There was a struggle at the door with Mr. Dubose in the vehicle and the officer outside the vehicle, and the vehicle sped away,” Cincinnati police Lt. Col. James Whalen told reporters, according to CNN.

Tensing fired one shot at the fleeing car, killing Dubose.

The Cincinnati Police Department, which is investigating the shooting, said that Dubose did not appear to have a weapon. Tensing was put on administrative leave pending the conclusion of the investigation.

Tensing was wearing a body camera, WLWT reports, but police have not released footage from it.

The University of Cincinnati Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A number listed for Audrey Dubose in Cincinnati was disconnected…

This is another killing like the one in South Carolina where the policeman killed a man running away on foot. There is no justification whatsoever to shoot a guy running away on the basis of a minor traffic stop. Even if the officer had reasonable suspicion of drunk driving. He/She does not pose any immediate danger to the officer. If the victim was a student at the University, there are a lot of ways to catch him and punish him, including expulsion from the school. I mean college kids do sumb isht all the time. Admittedly Dubose was older – but would this cop have shot at a car full of drunk frat kids? What was the cop trying to prove?